Norman E. Muller
Stockbridge,
VT, Cairn Site
Introduction
For the past ten years,
I have spent
a considerable amount of my free time exploring various cairn sites
from Pennsylvania to New England and beyond, attempting to discover a
pattern of design that might help to explain who constructed the
cairns, and when. With many sites up for grabs as our society
expands and wild lands become more threatened, the cairns and other
stone constructions found on these lands are also at risk.
Much
has undoubtedly already been lost to development.
In
1997, when I began my study of the Oley Hills site in Berks County,
Pennsylvania, I wanted to determine who constructed the impressive and
unusual cairns, platforms, walls and terrace, and possibly their
date. The previous owner had concluded that the stone
features
were Celtic, and archaeologists were pretty dismissive of anything
constructed of stone, concluding the features were Colonial.
I
had many archaeologists visit the site, but relatively few were
interested enough in it to help to understand it or even comment on
it. In spite of this disinterest on the part of
archaeologists, I
continued to search for evidence, and in time came up with some
information that in the future may help to save this site and others
like it.
Fig. A
|
Fig. B
|
The following spring I
had Bill Sevon, a geomorphologist with the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, visit the site with his
wife. As we walked
through it, I pointed
out the various stone
features. At the
large boulder (Fig. A),
which I concluded was the heart of the site, he remarked that the
boulder was not a glacial erratic but a tor, which in this case was the highly weathered remains of a bedrock outcrop that had eventually eroded loose from the
ledge it
now sits on (Muller 1998, 1999).
The
last continental glacier, the Wisconsin, ended its southern movement twenty miles
north of the Oley Hills site, which precluded any glacial erratics
being found
south of this margin. At
one time, Bill
said, the boulder probably rocked, and that the small stacks of rock
under the
north end of it were placed to keep it from rocking (Fig. B). Eventually large sections
of the south end of
the boulder broke loose and now form a semicircle of stone slabs
underneath
it. When that
happened, the boulder lost
its rocking abilities.
Fig. C
|
Fig. D
|
We then walked to the
large inclined cairn (Fig. C), and there Bill pointed to four large
quartz cobbles imbedded in the east face of the cairn (Fig. D.
The quartz appears as light gray on the image ) and said that the quartz could not have come from
the ridge where the
cairn is located, since the ridge was composed entirely of a granitic
gneiss
with only a dike of diabase intruding into it.
Furthermore, since the glacier stopped twenty miles to the
north, any
anomalous rock could not be attributed to glacial debris. Consequently, the
quartz had to have come
from a presently unknown location in the valley below where pegmatites
are more
common. This of
course meant that the
quartz was deliberately sought out and brought to the cairn site to be
placed
in the east facing side. Examining
this
process more closely, it is highly unlikely that that an eighteenth
century German
immigrant farmer would have done this.
Yet because of the association of quartz in a ritualistic
sense with the
American Indian, the placement of quartz makes for a more logical
interpretation of the cultural origin of this one monumental cairn and
of others
at the site.
Since
then, I have
sought answers from other sites to help understand and explain who
constructed
the manmade stone features found on them.
In many instances, the information remains elusive, but
for the Smith
cairn site in Rochester, Vermont, the detailed deed information that we
have
for it, combined with a collection of ledgers or daybooks that were
kept by
Chester Smith, the farmer who worked the land from 1847 to his death in
1903,
help to remove his name and other former landowners from the roster of
those
who might have been responsible for constructing the cairns, since
there was no
evidence in the daybooks that Smith built the cairns, nor is it likely
that the
former landowners did either. Some
of this
data I have laid out in the web article “An Unusual
Crescent-Shaped Cairn and
the Significance of Quartz,” (Muller 2007b). I
believe that the repetition
of certain stone features or accents from site to site throughout the
Northeast
is an indication of a region-wide cultural response to the landscape,
and is highly
unlikely to be interpreted or placed at the doorstep of colonial
farmers if
examined carefully and with an open mind.
In fact, there is no written or documentary evidence that
farmers
constructed such large cairns
as those found on sites in Vermont to enhance farm production; building them was
exceedingly time consuming
and makes absolutely no sense when farmers had trouble enough just
trying to
survive on upland farm sites. With
regard to stone accents, I am thinking particularly of split-wedged
boulders
and the deliberate placement of quartz in striking locations in cairns. If
we examine these accents from a regional perspective, they take on
heightened
significance.
By
pointing out how
similar features are found at sites many miles distant from one
another, we then
begin to weave a story that will help to undermine the paradigm still
held by
archaeologists in the Northeast that the Indians had no stone building
technology until this part of North America was settled by Europeans in
the
seventeenth century. Many
out there,
such as Peter
Waksman,
Larry Harrop and others, have assembled
data, photographic and otherwise, that will help to form a new
prehistory of
the region.
The
study below of a
site in Stockbridge, Vermont, should be viewed as just one more piece of the
puzzle. I have
noted where necessary how certain
distinctive features have been found elsewhere at sites from Pennsylvania to southern Vermont, thus emphasizing the regional nature of
this phenomenon. Besides
being
fascinating in their own right, they also make for a compelling story.
Copyright © 2007 by Norman E. Muller
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